Here at MostlyFilm, we like to ROCK. And since the Reading and Leeds festivals are happening this weekend, we’re opportunistically jumping on the musical bandwagon (is that a thing? – ed) to share with you some of our favourite obscure music videos. So turn off your email, turn up the sound and enjoy.

Want to travel back in time to 1914? Well, hurry up and invent time travel, then. Want to watch a bunch of films first shown in 1914? The BFI has just the thing, and Emma Street has done you a preview.

It’s that time of year again: the time when you go to see a film and are slightly baffled by the sudden appearance of a short extra thing, out of nowhere, before the main feature. The Virgin Media Shorts competition has been running since 2008 and is surely a good thing (£30,000 for the winner to make their next film), but it suffers rather from the niche marketing and poor penetration of short films in general.

This year the organisers have put more emphasis on interactivity. Not only will you be momentarily baffled when one of these films shows up in your cinema, but now you can follow the competition via hashtags, Facebook and probably SnapChat. All the films will also be screened through Virgin Media, with a People’s Champion being chosen by Virgin viewers. This leads, among other things, to the following piece of PR genius: “By voting through their TiVo® set top boxes, customers will choose their favourite of the 13 shortlisted films. The winner will win Virgin Media’s TiVo® service for a year (if they are an existing Virgin Media customer).” Well, yes.

The return of an occasional series in which Mostly Film looks at the best short films on the web

MostlyFilm likes big. MostlyFilm likes small. And given that we’re rather small ourselves, we like to see the things we champion get big: whether that be an individual film or a niche film festival. This feature is basically a one-stop window for the best – or at least the prettiest – of what’s going on in the world of short films and web series: a new artistic world that’s grown extraordinarily fast in the last ten years.

If you’ve made a short film yourself, or have just seen one you particularly like, please email editor@mostlyfilm.com, point us to it, and we’ll see what we can put together. If we get enough responses, we’re planning to put on an event in a central London cinema for outstanding respondents. So if you’re struggling to finish that short film, now might be the time to push it over the line.

What follows after the jump isn’t at all indicative of what we’re looking for; it’s just what’s turned up in our trawls over the past few weeks. More live action stuff this time, though. Continue reading Mostly Shorts 2→

An occasional series in which Mostly Film looks at the best short films being distributed on the web

A scene from the 2013 Best Short Film Oscar-winner ‘Inocente’

MostlyFilm likes big. MostlyFilm likes small. And given that we’re rather small ourselves, we like to see the things we champion get big: whether that be an individual film or a niche film festival. This feature is basically a one-stop window for the best – or at least the prettiest – of what’s going on in the world of short films and web series: a new artistic world that’s grown extraordinarily fast in the last ten years.

If you’ve made a short film yourself, or have just seen one you particularly like, please email editor@mostlyfilm.com, point us to it, and we’ll see what we can put together. If we get enough responses, we may put on an event in a central London cinema for outstanding respondents. So if you’re struggling to finish that short film, now might be the time to push it over the line.

What follows after the jump isn’t at all indicative of what we’re looking for; it’s just what’s turned up in our trawls over the past few weeks. The emphasis is on animated work, which doesn’t necessarily suggest a bias on our part: it’s just a reflection of how expensive live-action stuff is in comparison. You needn’t feel inhibited about nominating something different. In fact, we’d encourage you to do so. Continue reading Mostly Shorts→

About a week and a half ago, I spent a delightful Sunday morning at the Watershed in Bristol, watching a programme of the nominees for this year’s Best Animated Short Oscar. It’s a service provided in cinemas across the globe by the good people at Shorts HD. In preparation for this article, I did a quick check online shortly after the screening, and was delighted to discover that four of the films were viewable for free on YouTube, with the fifth only available via a dodgy streaming site I’d never heard of before.

One week later, three of those four YouTube links were dead. Could this have anything to do with Shorts HD’s plans to make their Oscar programme available for sale on iTunes? Possibly. It just means I’ve had to dig a little harder to find copies of the nominees for you to watch. They’re irritatingly embedded in all sorts of other pages, and I can’t guarantee how long they’ll be around for. Hurry, hurry, hurry.